by Kelli

gapvanmaren

I started to feel uncomfortable about the signs I was standing in front of. So I asked her what she thought.

She started crying. She was angry. “No one told me. No one told me it looked like that,” she said in a broken voice.

She continued, talking faster now: “All the reasons I had to abort—financial, educational, my difficulties with my boyfriend, seemed so logical at the time. No one ever showed me these pictures, or told me what abortion actually did. And now I have to live the rest of my life with the realization that I denied my baby Raven a chance at life. And there is no reason good enough for that.”

And that’s when I came to a realization: Her sin of commission was our sin of omission. In a country filled with Christians, filled with pro-lifers, the only person who had talked to this girl about abortion was an abortionist who took her money and killed her baby.

I realized then what I’ve realized a hundred times since: It doesn’t hurt a post-abortive woman to see a photo of an aborted baby. It only hurts her if she doesn’t see it in time. Like the middle-aged Asian woman who told me she had two abortions, but wouldn’t have had either of them if she’d seen our signs while making the decision. Like the girl in front of a high school who wondered why no one had ever told her what abortion actually did before….

She told me she’d named her aborted child “Raven,” and she had tattooed that name across her stomach just above the place that Raven lived out her short life.

And as I listened, I made up my mind that no girl or woman should ever be denied the truth about abortion. For the child’s sake, and for her sake.

Because we’ve lost too many little Ravens already.

~ Jonathon Van Maren, recalling his first experience as part of a college campus Genocide Awareness Project, The Bridgehead, August 11

[Photo via The Bridgehead]

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